David Foster Wallace "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993)
"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

Jerry Saltz "Sincerity and Irony Hug It Out" (2010)
It’s an attitude that says: "I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious."

David Foster Wallace (1993 interview)
"Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do?"

David Foster Wallace (1993 interview)
"All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy.
Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving."

Brendan Dempsey - [R]econstruction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth (2015)
Postmodernism: Or, the Loss of Depth
The process by which transcendence and grand narratives of faith lost their value or stronghold within contemporary society appears to have begun with modernity and the modern critique of religion. This process culminated within the postmodern worldview, which eschewed not just religious truth but all notions of transcendent truths, all grand narratives, archetypes, and paradigmatic models for living.
In doing so, however, postmodernism saw a radical narrowing of focus — a loss, one might say, of dimensionality. For, without something ‘deeper’, there is only surface: the one-dimensional plane of here and now. Without the grand objective picture there are only countless subjective lenses: no facts, only interpretations (Nietzsche again). In short, the foundation is removed, there is nothing to ground, nothing ‘deeper’ any longer. Now there is only total immanence.
As critics such as Baudrillard have pointed out, this distinctly postmodern development has led to a philosophical preoccupation with surfaces and simulacra—of shallowness and leveling.
From (pre)modern icons of spiritual transcendence…
we come to the postmodern kitsch of total material immanence…
…to signifiers without signifieds, to sensations without Sense, to life without depth.

Brendan Dempsey - [R]econstruction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth (2015)
There is a revival of the mythic; sublimity, narrative, depth, meaning, and reorientation are once again being sought out and can be seen within metamodern artforms. And yet, precisely because one knows this transcendence cannot be unequivocally asserted (indeed, quite the contrary), its entertainment as an idea is of an essentially different sort than (pre)modern naiveté. It is indeed an “informed naiveté” (9) a sense of transcendence arising out of and ultimately held in check by the acknowledged immanent frame.

Brendan Dempsey - [R]econstruction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth (2015)
However, metamodern mythopoeia never decidedly affirms or rejects the idea of the grand narratives of faith and transcendence. Indeed, it is precisely this ambiguity which allows for transcendent experience in the first place: metamodern faith must presume a kind of atheism if one is to have the freedom to create ‘God’. But this fragile theism that metamodern religious conceptions generate never settles on a fixed perspective, never loses the malleability of art. It cannot ossify completely into characteristically naïve religious conceptions before it crumbles again under critical scrutiny back to atheism. Indeed, it is only within this dynamism that such myths can exist.

Seth Abramson 'Metamodernism: The Basics' (2014)
"Metamodernism seeks to collapse distances, especially the distance between things that seem to be opposites, to recreate a sense of wholeness that allows us to -- in the lay sense -- transcend our environment and move forward with the aim of creating positive change in our communities and the world.

Seth Abramson 'Metamodernism: The Basics' (2014)
"…in the Internet Age we often feel like we're different people -- that is, different versions of the same person, or a single person so beset upon by the identities of other people on the Internet that we start to feel like a combination of how we see ourselves and how others see themselves.
The result of this kind of vertical layering of emotions or identities -- a layering in which each layer is co-equal in being present and active, rather than obscuring of other layers -- is that metamodern poems can sometimes seem sloppy or irresponsible or confusing or (most often) easy to read but difficult to understand. The reason for this is that the metamodern poet is "enacting" (making manifest on the page) what it's like to be alive in the Internet Age generally and to be on the Internet daily."

Seth Abramson 'Metamodernism: The Basics' (2014)
So in response to postmodernists' obsession with decay and decline and rupture, metamodernists say, "Okay, let's say you're right. We still have to live, don't we? To try to be happy? Try to create? Try to be part of a community? What sort of philosophy could let us aim toward a reconstruction of ourselves and our culture -- however problematic or illusory it might turn out to be -- that could also form part of a plan for healthy living and great creativity and even new forms of political action?"